It’s not racism when people of colour are prejudiced against white people.

And,

You can’t be sexist against men.

The deep intersectional wisdom of incompetent “comic artist” Alli Kirkham.

Via dicentra, Darleen Click finds a mother whose environmentalist pieties have produced a nightmare teenager: 

I can do nothing right in my teenage son’s eyes. He grills me about the distance travelled of each piece of fruit and every vegetable I purchase. He interrogates me about the provenance of all the meat, poultry and fish I serve. He questions my every move — from how I choose a car (why not electric?) and a couch (why synthetic fill?) to how I tend the garden (why waste water on flowers?) — an unremitting interrogation of my impact on our desecrated environment. While other parents hide alcohol and pharmaceuticals from their teens, I hide plastic containers and paper towels.

The mother in question, Ronnie Cohen, is a “freelance journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area” who writes about “social justice issues.”

And Andrew Stuttaford quotes Peggy Noonan on lofty border policies: 

Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighbourhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality — normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular. The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder. 

I spotted a not dissimilar attitude, albeit in a different context, while watching this BBC documentary on the preservation and listing of despised Brutalist architecture – specifically, the notorious Park Hill estate in Sheffield, which embarrassingly dominates the city’s skyline. Note the romantic enthusiasm of the presenter, architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff, for this locally infamous eyesore, which is known chiefly for muggings, prostitution and the joys of dodging objects hurled from upper floors. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Dyckhoff does not live in, or near, Sheffield.) Note too, around 18:25, the views of Martin Cherry from English Heritage, who airily dismisses the preferences of Sheffield residents and insists that the local population will eventually come to embrace this “demanding” and “difficult” piece of “progressive” architecture.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

For newcomers, three items from the archives:  

Feel the Racial Healing. 

The Guardian’s Aisha Mirza bemoans the “psychic burden” of living among white people, which is worse than being mugged.

The more I think about it, the more this may exemplify a near-perfect Guardian article, the ideal to which all other Guardian columnists should aspire. It’s haughty and obnoxious, is ignorant of relevant subject matter, is frequently question-begging, and its imagined piety is premised on a rather obvious double standard. Specifically, Ms Mirza’s belief that people who leave London do so, secretly, because they don’t feel comfortable living among people with skin of a darker hue, which is racist and therefore bad, and her own simultaneous preference not to live among people whose skin is paler than hers, which is somehow not racist at all, and is in fact aired as the last word in righteousness.

Aesthetes, Take Heed. 

Brace yourselves for some taxpayer-funded cultural improvement.

Those with a taste for even more daring and challenging work may prefer the theatrical stylings of Mr Ivo Dimchev, a “radical performer” acclaimed for his “gripping sensitivity” and whose performance piece I-ON “explores” the “provoking functionlessness” of various objects, before showing us “how to make contact with something that has no function.” Readers are advised that the aforementioned contact-making, which was performed as part of the 2011 Vienna International Dance Festival and is shown below, inevitably includes vigorous self-pleasure with what appears to be a wig.

Strange Construal. 

In which socialists misremember a 1970s sitcom.

To seize on The Good Life as an affirmation of eco-noodling and a “non-greedy alternative” to modern life is unconvincing to say the least. The Goods only survive, and then just barely, because of their genuinely self-supporting neighbours – the use of Jerry’s car and chequebook being a running gag, along with convenient access to Margo’s social contacts and expensive possessions. And insofar as the series has a feel-good tone, it has little to do with championing ‘green’ lifestyles or “self-sufficiency.” It’s much more about the fact that, despite Tom and Barbara’s dramas and continual mooching, and despite Margo’s imperious snobbery, on which so much of the comedy hinges, the neighbours remain friends. If anything, the terribly bourgeois Margo and Jerry are the more plausible moral heroes, given all that they have to put up with and how often they, not Tom’s principles, save the day.

There’s more, should you want it, in the updated greatest hits. 

Ashe Schow on attempts to exacerbate campus “rape” hysteria: 

One of the best tactics so-called researchers have used to conclude that fully one-fifth of college women will be sexually assaulted is to vastly expand the definition of what [rape] is… Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown dissects the [Rutgers University survey], noting the definition of “sexual assault” and “sexual violence” included everything from “remarks about physical appearance” and “persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient” to “threats of force to get someone to engage in sexual behaviour, as well as unwanted touching and unwanted oral, anal, or vaginal penetration or attempted penetration.” There’s an ocean of difference between someone saying you look good today and someone physically pinning you down against your will. To include both under the category of “sexual assault” is just ludicrous, and certainly not a serious way of studying the issue.

These, though, are the standards of Rutgers’ School of Social Work.

And via Ace, Timothy Sandefur tracks the wildly changing politics of Star Trek: 

At no point in the show’s history had Kirk or his colleagues treated the Klingons unjustly, whereas audiences for decades have watched the Klingons torment and subjugate the galaxy’s peaceful races. In “Errand of Mercy,” they attempt genocide to enslave the Organians. In “The Trouble with Tribbles,” they try to poison a planet’s entire food supply… Yet never does the Klingon leader, Gorkon, or any of his people, acknowledge — let alone apologise for — such injustices. Quite the contrary; his daughter tells a galactic conference, “We are a proud race. We are here because we intend to go on being proud.” Within the context of the original Star Trek, such pride is morally insane. Yet in service to Spock’s mission of elevating peace over right, the film [Undiscovered Country] portrays the Klingons not as thugs, but as misunderstood casualties of human bigotry. Kirk and his crew, says Gorkon’s daughter at the Enterprise banquet, represent a “homo sapiens-only club,” devoted to such chauvinistic values as “inalienable human rights.” “Why, the very name,” she quips, “is racist.”

The incoherent utopianism of many Trek episodes – “the pernicious ideal,” as dicentra called it – has been discussed here before, many times, along with the authoritarian types who imagine a similarly ‘progressive’ tomorrow. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Janice Fiamengo on feminist narratives and unmentioned history: 

After 1832, about one in five men had the right to vote. Almost half of adult males, though, were still not eligible to vote when they accepted the call to fight and die for their country in the First World War. It wasn’t until 1918 that the right to vote was extended, not only to women – which of course we hear a great deal about – but to all men. So how can this be – that this part of the story is almost completely unknown? How come when we celebrate the extension of the franchise to women, we don’t talk about its extension to poor and working class men?

Via sk60, Jonathan Foreman on the Tim Hunt “sexism” drama and the dishonesty and malevolence of certain key players: 

The most generous interpretation of Connie St Louis’s bizarre behaviour is that she was too intellectually limited to recognise irony that was somehow obvious to an audience composed mostly of people who spoke English as a second language. A leak of the unedited version of her “Stop Defending Tim Hunt” piece for the Guardian is so garbled and incoherent that this actually seems plausible, though it also makes you wonder how and why she came to be teaching journalism even at a third-rate institution like London’s City University.

And Peter Hasson on ‘progressive’ educators and predetermined conclusions: 

Multiple professors at Washington State University have explicitly told students their grades will suffer if they use terms such as “illegal alien,” “male,” and “female,” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students. According to the syllabus for Selena Lester Breikss’ “Women & Popular Culture” class, students risk a failing grade if they use any common descriptors that Breikss considers “oppressive and hateful language.” […] Students taking Professor Rebecca Fowler’s “Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies” course will see their grades suffer if they use the term “illegal alien” in their assigned writing.[…] White students in Professor John Streamas’s “Introduction to Multicultural Literature” class are expected to “defer” to non-white students, among other community guidelines, if they want “to do well in this class.”

Imagine what such ‘thinkers’ might do if granted real power. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Christina Hoff Sommers on the fantasies and evasions of hashtag feminism: 

Someone needs to tell [campus feminists] that most of [their] statistics are specious and that… they are among the most liberated and privileged — and safest — people on earth. Because their professors would not tell them, that someone turned out to be me; for this I was furnished with a police escort on more than one occasion… Too often, today’s gender activists are not fighting injustice, but fighting phantom epidemics and nursing petty grievances. Two leading feminist hashtags of 2015 are #FreeTheNipples and #LovetheLines. The former is a campaign to desexualise women’s breasts; the latter promotes stretch-mark acceptance. If the imprisoned women of Iran and Afghanistan were free to tweet, what would they say about these struggles?

Ah, but in terms of “oppression” and “patriarchal assumptions” – according to feminist scholarship – the average American campus is indistinguishable from Uganda and Somalia. What, you didn’t know?

John Leo shares a list of things that are apparently racist, including hoop skirts, raised eyebrows and Christmas dinner: 

Writer Ron Rosenbaum said in Slate that racism accounts for the popularity of white-meat turkey over more flavourful dark meat. “White meat turkey has no taste,” he explained. “Despite its superior taste, dark meat has dark undertones for some. Dark meat seems to summon up ancient fears of contamination and miscegenation as opposed to the supposed superior purity of white meat.”

And Peter Fricke notes a progressive approach to shoplifting: 

Everett Mitchell, a former assistant district attorney, suggested that communities of colour may prefer that police refrain from enforcing laws against theft from large retail chains because responding to such crimes leads to an increased police presence in neighbourhoods where shoplifting is prevalent.

Apparently Mr Mitchell prefers “restorative justice” and “community service” for non-violent offenders under the age of 25. Though one wonders how justice of any kind is to be achieved if criminals with brown skin mustn’t be apprehended.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Melissa Fabello shares her interracial dating advice with the chronically fretful readers of Everyday Feminism: 

While interracial dynamics always add a layer of work to romance, it’s important to note that I’m white. Because when you’re a white person in an interracial relationship, there’s this whole – ohhh, ya know – white supremacy thing hanging in the air. And that has to be acknowledged – and dealt with – constantly.

At this point, the opening paragraph, we could probably cut things short. I mean, if you’re considering dating someone who thinks it important to mention their melanin levels and thinks that “white supremacy” is a feature of any future relationship, something to “acknowledge constantly,” you should probably walk away, quite briskly. Seriously, just get the hell out of there. However, for the morbidly curious among you, Ms Fabello has a list of “things to remember as a white person involved with a person of colour.” It begins thusly:

As a feminist and a woman, I could never be in a relationship with someone who didn’t feel comfortable talking about patriarchy.  

Hey, baby. Wanna talk about patriarchy?

Gender (and the social dynamics therein) is a part of my everyday life, both in how I’m perceived by the world and in the work that I do. So if I tried to date someone who felt discomfort to the point of clamming up every time I brought gender into the conversation, that “It’s not you, it’s me” discussion would come up quick.

Note the words “every time.”

The same goes for race… While it’s okay for conversations about white supremacy to make you uncomfortable (hey, we should be uncomfortable with that shit), being generally aware of how race plays out and feeling fairly well versed in racial justice issues is important.

And feeling mutually awkward while sharing identitarian dogma and confessions of “white supremacy” is what binds lovers together, surely? Sadly, these moments of shared discomfort, however frequent and interminable, may not suffice:

While it’s important to be willing to talk to your partner about race and to feel comfortable bringing it up, it’s just as important to be willing to step back and recognise when your whiteness is intrusive… Not all family structures operate the same way… Maybe it isn’t appropriate for your partner to take you home to meet their parents.

Apparently, the thing to take away from this is that if your partner-of-colour’s family-of-colour don’t want to meet you, a person of pallor, or have you in their home, then, obviously, it’s your fault. Because “you represent an oppressive system” by “virtue of your privileges.”

Because as white people, we’ve been socialised racist.

In short, honkie germs. And for the excruciatingly pious, further complications can loom in the bedroom:

Neo-Neocon on leftist narratives and post-Ferguson policing: 

One effect of the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie is to tell would-be perpetrators that they’re better off defying a cop than surrendering, because it won’t help them to put their hands up since the cop will shoot them anyway. So the covert message is that they may as well try to attack the police officer (or run), who would just as soon shoot them as not, no matter what they do.

Somewhat related, Salon’s Scott Eric Kaufman insists that black males “shouldn’t have to” comply with lawful instructions from the police. Which sounds like exactly the kind of attitude that gets people hurt. Presumably, Mr Kaufman is untroubled by such details.

Christopher Snowdon on obesity as “incurable” and the rigorous journalism of Mr George Monbiot: 

[Monbiot’s] second piece of evidence is a recently published study which found that only 3,500 of a cohort of 176,000 obese Britons tracked in 2004 had returned to a healthy weight by 2014. A success rate of two per cent would have been disappointing if this was a clinical trial, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t a trial at all and no attempt was made to ‘cure’ the people involved. The researchers never met them, didn’t know their names, didn’t attempt any intervention and there is no evidence that they were even trying to lose weight. 

And this, from Thomas Sowell: 

Despite an old saying that taxes are the price we pay for civilisation, an absolute majority of the record-breaking tax money collected by the federal government today is simply transferred by politicians from people who are not likely to vote for them to people who are more likely to vote for them.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

What we’re trying to show you is that this bad reporting comes from a particular historical, political and social milieu… There’s no way to explain why somebody isn’t a good person, doesn’t behave professionally, doesn’t behave ethically at their job [as a journalist] unless you understand their motivations.

Those of you who’ve been following the GamerGate saga may find the video below of interest. It’s an abridged version of a debate held over the weekend at the Society of Professional Journalists’ Airplay event in Miami, in which assorted journalists, gamers and game developers tried to communicate with each other, with varying degrees of success. I was watching it via livestream on Saturday evening. It’s the first time I’d seen a bomb threat announced live, twice. Even if it’s not your thing, it may be worth listening to Christina Hoff Sommers’ “huge boobs” anecdote around 6:46.

An unedited recording can be found in two parts here and here. 

Janice Fiamengo explains why she’s happy to be called an “anti-feminist”:  

If further explanation is required, it may be worth revisiting this video here, which offers vivid illustrations of the behaviour Fiamengo describes, including harassment, thuggery, and the spectacle of supposedly empowered feminists getting quite literally hysterical. See also this related video, in which a feminist professor of philosophy, Alice McLachlan, tells us that she’s “warmed” by the sight of students – self-imagined intellectuals – congratulating themselves for making discussion impossible. Apparently Ms McLachlan, whose gift for dishonesty is something to behold, “cares a lot about free speech.” Just not for people who might dare to disagree with her. But then we mustn’t expect consistency and logic from a professor of philosophy.